METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR CONTROLLING A SYSTEM

• US 20150051713A1
• Filed: 03/19/2013
• Published: 02/19/2015
• Est. Priority Date: 03/19/2012
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: British Telecommunications PLC (BT Group PLC)
• Original Assignee: British Telecommunications PLC (BT Group PLC)
• Inventors: Azvine, Behnam, Martin, Trevor Philip
• Granted Patent: US 9,897,987 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 700/1
• CPC Class Codes: G05B 15/02 electric
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2218/00 Aspects of pattern recognition specially adapted for signal processing
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 40/20 Movements or behaviour, e.g. gesture recognition recognition of facial expressions G06V40/16
• CPC Class Codes: H04H 60/45 for identifying users

Abstract

A system controller (20, 100, 30, 40) comprises a receiver (20) for receiving data about a system (10, 11) to be controlled and for associating the received data with a time factor; a summariser (100) for updating a set of summary bins, each of which covers a respective period of time, and each of which stores a summary of the received data having, a time factor which falls within the respective period of time covered by the summary bin; a processor (30) for, processing the summary bins, for example in order to categorise an unknown entity (5) (such as a human user) interacting with the system under control (10, 11) (via a user interface (11) forming part of the system under control) such as into an adult interested in football, etc., and a director (40) for issuing control instructions to the system to be controlled based on the results of the processor (30). The periods of time covered by respective summary bins include overlapping periods of time and periods of time having different durations and are preferably overlapping, fuzzy, multi-scale bins.

Claims

1. A system controller comprising:

a receiver for receiving data about a system to be controlled and for associating the received data with a time factor;

a summariser for updating a set of summary bins, each of which covers a respective period of time, and each of which stores a summary of the received data having a time factor which falls within the respective period of time covered by the summary bin;

a processor for processing the summary bins; and

a director for issuing control instructions to the system to be controlled based on the results of the processor;

wherein the periods of time covered by respective summary bins include overlapping periods of time and periods of time having different durations.

2. A system controller according to claim 1 wherein the summariser is operable to generate and then update new summary bins and to amalgamate older summary bins into one or more coarser grained summary bins as new data associated with more recent times is received.

3. A system controller according to claim 1 wherein the summary bins are fuzzy bins in the sense that where bins, having the same granularity, cover overlapping periods of time, data associated with a time falling within such an overlap is apportioned between the overlapping summary bins for summarising purposes in accordance with fuzzy membership rules.

4. A system controller according to claim 1 wherein the received data is data resulting from interactions between an unknown entity and the system to be controlled and wherein the processor is operable to perform a categorisation of the received data in order to identify a category with which to associate the entity, and wherein the director issues instructions to the system to be controlled to modify its behaviour in order to be tailored to the unknown entity in accordance with the categorisation performed by the processor.

5. A system according to claim 4 wherein the system to be controlled is a social networking platform and wherein each user of the social networking platform constitutes an unknown entity to be categorised, and wherein the system can be controlled to disable certain functionality for a particular user if the category identified by the processor disagrees with a categorisation provided by the user.

6. A summariser for use in the system of claim 1, the summariser being operable to update a set of summary bins, each of which covers a respective period of time, and each of which stores a summary of some received data having a time factor associated therewith which falls within the respective period of time covered by the summary bin;

wherein the periods of time covered by respective summary bins include overlapping periods of time and periods of time having different durations.

7. A summariser according to claim 6 being further operable to generate and then update new summary bins and to amalgamate older summary bins into one or more coarser grained summary bins as new data associated with more recent times is received.

8. A summariser according to claim 6 wherein the summary bins are fuzzy bins in the sense that where bins, having the same granularity, cover overlapping periods of time, data associated with a time falling within such an overlap is apportioned between the overlapping summary bins for summarising purposes in accordance with fuzzy membership rules.

9. A summarised data reconstructer for use with the system of claim 1, which is operable to provide a reconstruction of summarised data for a specified time interval, comprising a receiver for receiving an indication of an interval of time of interest for which data is required and optionally an indication of the attributes of interest;

a bin identifier for identifying the or each summary bin that is relevant to the received interval of time of interest;

an aggregator for, in the event that more than one summary bin is identified by the bin identifier, aggregating the identified summary bins; and

an extractor for extracting from the summary bin, or from the summary bins after aggregation where the bin identifier identified more than one bin, attribute values.

10. A method of controlling a system, the method comprising:

receiving data about the system being controlled;

associating the received data with a time factor;

generating or updating a set of summary bins and storing the associated values thereof within a suitable data store, each of which summary bins is associated with a respective period of time, and each of which stores a summary of the received data associated with its respective period of time;

processing the summary bins; and

generating and issuing control instructions to the system being controlled based on the results of the processing of the summary bins;

wherein the periods of time associated with respective summary bins include overlapping periods of time and periods of time having different durations.

11. A non-transient carrier means carrying processor implementable instructions for causing the method of claim 10 to be carried out during execution of instructions when run on a computer processor.